Swedish feminist supports polygamy

There were complaints in Sweden when a Muslim refugee brought his three wives to live with him and a house worth $2,000,000 (AUD) was bought by a local authority for them all to live in.

He found support though in a Swedish feminist who finds much to admire in polygamy:

The feminist artist and writer Ulla Lundegård cannot understand why it is so outrageous that Muslim men bring more wives when they come to Sweden.

"Why do we place so much emphasis on the fact that this man has three wives? And why are you talking with disgust that the municipality has to get an apartment for all of these? You also have the right to live, right?" asks the 65-year-old feminist.

She states that we must not let our "prejudices and established tradition-bound norms" stand in the way of how enriching it may actually be for a Muslim man to have a whole set of wives.

"The children have three mothers with different qualities and ages that can penetrate when needed. They can even share their love for the man and live in the same house! It's more than any of us can imagine."

The Muslim family constellation with several wives can in fact be much more exciting than the boring Swedish couple relationships:

"It may even be that they live a much more interesting life than many Swedish couples do after thirty years. Women may even have fellowship with each other," writes Ulla Lundegård.

Feminists have spent decades criticising the Western family as being an outmoded patriarchal institution, and yet Ulla Lundegård cannot speak highly enough of the Muslim institution, claiming that it is a much more interesting way of life than is found in the West, that it is based on the sharing of love and that it is mere prejudiced adherence to tradition to oppose it.

In many of her newspaper columns, Ulla Lundegård blames society's ills on the patriarchy and yet the Islamic version of marriage gets a free pass. Why?

I can only speculate about this. First, leftists often follow the idea that it is Western men who have created institutions to create an unearned privilege for themselves at the expense of others. If true, this would mean that non-Western institutions don't have the same kind of political guilt attached to them as Western ones.

Or, perhaps, it has to do with liberal morality. Liberals tend to believe that it doesn't matter what a person chooses to do morally, that the moral thing is a freedom to choose as we will. So in one sense liberal morality is libertine and transgressive. However, the liberal system does ultimately generate a moral code. If the point is that I can choose in any direction, as long as I don't restrict the right of others to similarly choose, then what matters morally is that I respect choice, am non-discriminatory, tolerant, open, inclusive and so on. Therefore, if I am a liberal and I want to virtue signal, I will want to show that I am the most open and inclusive to whoever is most "other" to myself - which in practice is often thought to be Muslim immigrants. Therefore in preferring a Muslim tradition to her own, Ulla Lundegård is signalling her virtue in terms of a liberal moral code.

(This helps to explain why liberals seem culturally suicidal. Why, for instance, would German liberals welcome millions of young Middle-Eastern men to their society when this will mean a transformation of Germany from a liberal society to a Muslim one? Perhaps one reason is the aspect of liberal morality I have just described, that it becomes virtuous in a liberal moral code to be most open toward the group most "other" to your own. To survive, liberals would have to go against their own morality - most would prefer to bow out "morally" rather than survive.)

Another possible explanation is that polygamy might have some appeal for Western feminists. A lot of these feminists will be entering old age minus any kind of relationship. Perhaps the thought that polygamy offers the opportunity of several women sharing a high status male might appeal to them (I doubt it would appeal as much though to the first wives of these men).

Finally, there is the liberal mindset that the choices that we make are not what matters, that choices are equally choices (as James Kalb puts the liberal view), that they are merely subjective preferences, so that the critical thing is not to have tradition or "prejudice" determining choice, but to throw it all up in the air. There is no sense here that some choices are more likely to lead to an integrated life, in which the social, biological/natural and spiritual aspects of reality are best harmonised, nor that tradition can represent, at its best, a collective working out over time of what is necessary for success in the lives of individuals and communities.